Best Ideas from 2007 F21 National Assembly
| Plenary Session | Best Ideas |
I. Personal Reflections & Connecting to Colleagues: Shaping a Meaningful Career
Taking time— to reflect on one’s own experiences and style, as well as on how colleagues have charted a meaningful scholarly career— is an important step for faculty at all career stages. The questions, taken from Creativity by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, can be used for personal reflections and for connecting to colleagues. By exploring career-related issues, you can compare both your personal reflections and the responses received through interviews with colleagues. See if through an interview you can identify special practices or strategies that enable people to keep focused, ask the right questions, make a difference for their students, their scholarly field, and their campus community. |
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II. Asking Critical Questions: A Leadership Responsibility
An opportunity to hear personal stories of the journey toward leadership and the impact of leaders developing leaders. |
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III. Developing Leaders Within the Faculty Ranks as Teachers, Scholars & Campus Citizens
As the current context for higher education changes dramatically, with new student populations, more expectations from various publics, greater demands in the workplace, limited budgets, and escalating technological possibilities, Indiana University has looked to faculty leaders to respond to these challenges. The University has long understood the strategic role that faculty play in directing the future of higher education. As a result, the Faculty Leadership Institute Model was created in 1996 and funded to encourage faculty to seek an understanding of national issues and institutional needs and then to provide leadership on issues beyond their department or school. This model provides the foundation that has enabled faculty to design new freshman learning community programs, teaching strategies for large classes, strategic plans, and diversity programs. It is an outstanding example of how academic leadership can provide creative solutions for issues and problems in higher education. In 2003, The American Association of University Administrators recognized the Indiana University Leadership Model with the John L. Blackburn Award for Exemplary Leadership. |
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"Leadership in Place" by J. Wergin |
IV. Making Smart Decisions: A Leadership Opportunity
Determining which strategies fit your goals— given the range of possible options, involves making smart choices about alternatives: considering consequences, exploring and quantifying tradeoff s. First— a reminder: the key to effective decision-making is to be working on something about which you are passionate. Fundamental goals are important because they capture what you ultimately care about, and serve as a platform from which you can evaluate and compare alternatives. In the pursuit of making smart decisions, you must keep asking yourself, “why do I care about this?” Let your goal be your guide; the very process of articulating a goal— thinking it through and writing it down— goes a long way toward helping you make smart decisions about strategies to realize that goal. In this session, a roadmap will be presented through which you can explore means for reaching your goal by making smart decisions— considering the consequences of alternative strategies, experimenting with a tool that guides the process of making smart decisions. With thanks to my Harvard colleague, Howard Raiffa. An effective decision-making approach:
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V. What’s a PKAL? A “Fanciful Horizon” Exercise
The most recent PKAL Volume IV posting begins a series on student learning goals. This series is conceived as a resource for PKAL’s emerging, NSF-funded STEM Faculty Development project. Through essays, stories, interviews, and other materials, we will present insights from reflective practitioners in the field about their work in equipping students to be problem-solvers, critical thinkers, great communicators, and more. The first posting dealt with the goal of “creativity,” a challenge to the community to become more fluent and flexible and intuitive in thinking about how the undergraduate STEM learning environment could be reimagined, as one looks toward the future. We take the theme of creativity to set the stage for an evening of play for assembly participants. Whether this is your first or your twentieth time at a PKAL event, you have some sense of what PKAL is, of our goal to make a significant contribution to the transformation of the undergraduate STEM learning environment. You may also understand our strategies: to take the kaleidoscopic perspective, focus on what works, bring all the players to the table, serve as an intelligence broker. We all also have a sense of the kind of organization or environment that we like to be a part of: one we can contribute to, benefit from, knowing it is making a difference now and that it will continue to do so. So, this is a time to play, to engage in the exercise described on the following page.
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VI. Making Critical Connections: A Leadership Responsibility
Leaders, as scholars and citizens, make a difference in context, in the various communities to which they belong. Reflecting on the Assembly discussions to this point, panelists and participants will explore how to identify and shape opportunities for leadership within and beyond the campus— at the local, state, national, and international level. |
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VII. What Works: Goals & Strategies for Changing the World
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